Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne - Reviewed Verne Dawson, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until May 13th (01-6081116) Simon English: untitled scenes from a journey, Series II, Cross Gallery, Dublin, until April 24th (01-4738978) Michael Kane, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until May 1st (01-6708055) Finola Jones: Dog, Goethe-Institut, Dublin, until April 24th (01- 6611155)
There is, self-evidently, a naive quality to Verne Dawson's paintings at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, but it's not so much that they are naive, or faux-naif, as that they are partly about naivety and credulity. In some paintings he makes mistakes, or seems to make mistakes, common among amateur artists, yet in others there are none of the telltale signs of the amateur. Mind you, that doesn't make his laboured naivety any less annoying on occasion.
Dawson is a postmodern artist in this sense: he aims to accommodate the multiple, fractured narratives of human history and thought in the space of one eclectic vision - one could say one deliriously eclectic vision. In this there is a tacit recognition of the futility of the modernist ideal that everything might be contained in the framework of a single, all-encompassing, homogeneous style.
He tries to sidestep the accoutrements of style but in a necessarily self-conscious way. What comes across in his strange fantasy images is a concern with origin myths, occult systems, social and religious ideas and rituals, and utopian theories, including those drawn from fantasy and science fiction. Just as he tries to visualise all this in a stylistically innocent way, Dawson doesn't make the usual discriminations about the cultural provenance of the ideas involved. The Watchtower rubs shoulders with The Social Contract. Kitsch is taken as having the same weight as high art, astrology as astronomy.
The results can be interesting, particularly when he generates a sense of an offbeat personal mythology, in The Big Bear, for example, which prompts us to look at other myths, other beliefs. But overall there is a disparity between the weight of its concerns and the substance of the work.
For most of the time one would have to say that, given the nature of the ideas it aims to deal with, the work, caught between the demands of various imperatives, is not allowed to be interesting enough in itself.
Simon English gives his Cross Gallery show a cautious, noncommittal title, untitled scenes from a journey, Series II. It's noncommittal because of the way the "untitled" pre-empts and qualifies the "scenes", and the use of lower case further indicates that the scenes are not sights in the conventional sense of picturesque or spectacular. As with English's previous work, such is indeed the case. The reference to a second series suggests more of the same - not, incidentally, in a pejorative sense.
The scenes are pared-down views in passing of blank tracts of flat or mountainous terrain, receding to horizons beyond which wan sun or moonlight filters through thick haze. Occasionally, a building stands against the horizon, a clean- cut modernist structure or a more ambiguous form, bearing some resemblance to a period country house, rows of windows illuminated from within by pallid electric light.
Now and again English slips in a throwback to previous series of painting, a study of an ornate table or an empty vitrine.
These come across as allegories of painting, the gilded surround and the empty space suggesting a diversionary circulation around a central absence. But then the ostensible presences in English's painting are always just as absent: landscapes devoid of incident, buildings that have a hollowed, empty feeling, like the clouds that are another favoured motif. Although the idea of a destination haunts the images, it's clear that we can never arrive anywhere. The ideas of sameness and repetition have been important to English's schema, and he comes up with an interesting development of them, with several paintings of multiple images.
Michael Kane's sombre, vigorously brushed paintings at the Rubicon Gallery are rough-hewn, anonymous portraits. They are drawn from photographs of people taken in Co Wicklow, where he was himself born, around 1960. His interest lies in the way these personal photographs have become something else.
Acquired and collated by a social archivist they are now historical documents, and his paintings set out to effect another transformation. They focus on and monumentalise the way the individuals in the photographs reflect social and pictorial archetypes and values: family group, mother and child, couple. There are also two paintings, of mechanics, that exemplify a particular image of masculinity.
Kane's paintings becomes monuments to these lives lived and, in their making, they become clouded with distance. Although they are, physically, emphatically there and robust, it is as if they are also fading away as the individual presences merge into the larger pattern.
Finola Jones's Dog at the Goethe-Institut is lying doggo. Filmed in Naples's main railway station, the dog is lying sprawled against a wall while trains come and go and people rush past in the background. We see their shadows and hear the racket of a busy station. Our view of the dog presents several possibilities: perhaps it's a still image, perhaps it's dead, perhaps it's preternaturally calm.
Then a twitch of the leg prompts the realisation that the animal is indeed preternaturally calm, having a snooze and completely unfazed by the drama of modernity being enacted all around. This unlikely, quirkily likeable token of stillness in the midst of the hurly-burly throws into relief the business of rushing around that we take more and more for granted in daily life.
As if to emphasise this, Dog is part of a work in progress and will eventually be one of some 22 simultaneous projections of sequences filmed in several international locations.
Busy, busy, busy.
